Every freshman football player at Ball State University had to sing his high school fight song in front of the team, and I remember my voice cracking in the middle of "On, North Judson," sung to the tune of "On, Wisconsin."

The memory still makes me cringe, and chuckle. The laughter comes easier recalling my roommate from Santa Claus, Ind., being coerced to belt out a verse of "Here Comes Santa Claus" as upperclassmen cracked up.

Those fun memories came back this week after I reached out to about a dozen former Ball State teammates from the late 1980s to make sure their college football hazing experiences never went beyond being asked to embarrass themselves singing.

We were among the lucky ones, playing for a head coach, Paul Schudel, who respected people too much to tolerate humiliating rituals in the name of team unity and who sought to create a culture consistent with the decent person he was. We understood the difference in comical and criminal behavior, realizing peer pressure had its limits. We weren't spared singing our fight songs or carrying shoulder pads for upperclassmen who felt the need to establish a locker-room hierarchy, but we knew where the line was between a rite of passage and violation of rights, between humorous and heinous.

That line has been blurred for generations by players in all sports in the name of tradition, with Wheaton College the latest inexplicable, indefensible example.

In one of the most disturbing sports stories of the week, five Wheaton football players were charged with felonies stemming from a hazing incident in March 2016 in which a teammate alleges he was bound with duct tape, beaten and left half-naked with two torn shoulders on a nearby baseball field. His allegation accuses the players of abducting him from his dorm room, taping his arms, legs and chest, trying to sodomize him, threatening to rape him and bizarrely playing Middle Eastern music in the car before dumping him in the middle of the night.

Mark Sutter, the attorney for the family of Wheaton College football player Noah Spielman, discusses the charges against Spielman and four other players in connection with a 2016 hazing incident. Sept. 20, 2017 (Stacy St. Clair / Chicago Tribune)

Mark Sutter, the attorney for the family of Wheaton College football player Noah Spielman, discusses the charges against Spielman and four other players in connection with a 2016 hazing incident. Sept. 20, 2017 (Stacy St. Clair / Chicago Tribune)

The school responded, after its internal investigation, by requiring several players to perform 50 hours of community service and write an essay about their behavior. In a statement, a spokesman referred to the incident as "entirely unacceptable and inconsistent with the values we share as human beings" — official acknowledgement that something regrettable happened.

Four of the accused players sat out the 2016 home opener. Three of them played last week for Wheaton, proudly representing the Division III program that's ranked fourth in the nation. All five were suspended Tuesday but only after felony charges were filed.

This suggests you don't have to have a million-dollar recruiting budget or a 100,000-seat stadium to fall prey to a win-at-all-costs mentality. This occurred at an evangelical college with 2,850 students, within a football program that, on its website, espouses to seek "leaders, highly motivated individuals who take their Christian commitment, their education and their football seriously." This was a bad week to be Wheaton athletic director Julie Davis or longtime football coach Mike Swider, both of whom declined interview requests.

What took authorities so long to file charges is a legitimate question but not bigger than the troubling ones regarding the atmosphere at Wheaton that empowered five football players to feel as if such reprehensible actions were acceptable. Something about their experiences must have made those five believe it was fine to include physical coercion as part of hazing, an archaic concept that led to this mess.

Hazing is bullying hidden behind the mask of tradition, every coward's way of announcing his presence. Hazing is an act of entitled people executed by those who think they live by different rules others should follow, by force if necessary. Hazing isn't a nod to letting boys be boys as much as opening the door to deviants being deviants, a dated practice every coach at every level of every sport must eliminate before it festers.

Systemic change isn't unreasonable to demand, especially not at a place like Wheaton, where Swider told D3Football.com last November that "we really pride ourselves in getting them to understand that life is about service."

Wheaton publicly portrays its football program like the Peace Corps with goal posts, altruistically boasting in literature and online about mission trips players take every year to needy countries. Noah Spielman, the most well-known among the accused players because of his father, Chris, a former NFL linebacker, cited Wheaton's value system when transferring from Toledo.

But you start to question Wheaton's values when a hazing incident comes one year after the last nationally publicized "team-building" activity in 2015, when players wore Ku Klux Klan robes and carried Confederate flags as part of a parody in poor taste. You begin to wonder what it says about the Wheaton football program when a former player alleges he was mentally and physically abused badly enough to require medical care and flee campus the next day. You suspect this problem is bigger than Wheaton in an era when many entitled young people think respecting others is an old-fashioned thing their parents and grandparents did.

You fear that this sophomoric stuff still happens too often on campuses big and small across America, and Wheaton can do its part by speaking out against hazing instead of lawyering up.

After all, the mission statement says: "Wheaton College athletics exists to foster the development of Christian faith, character." Now all the school has to do is live up to its own standards.

Be an example instead of an embarrassment so that, one day 30 years from now, a Wheaton football player can reflect fondly on his experience with more pride than shame.